Archive for July, 2011

Thirty years ago this month, my father ordered an Atari 810 disk drive for our family’s Atari 800 from a place called “Omega Sales Co., Inc.” in Rhode Island. Thirty years ago yesterday, Omega filled out the invoice you see here and shipped the order to my dad.

From the invoice, you can see that my father also ordered a copy of Star Raiders for the 800 and a set of joysticks. Unfortunately, the joysticks were out of stock and had to be backordered.

I still have our family Atari 810, and I still love the unique sound it makes when reading disks. That device composed the soundtrack to my computing childhood.

Price Check

The Atari 810 sold for US $449 from this vendor, which is equivalent to $1,114.95 in 2011 dollars. To translate, the thing was bloody expensive. The 810 could read 88 kilobytes of data per disk side (one side at a time), which makes for a whopping $12.66 per kilobyte in today’s dollars. Right now, you can buy a 2 terabyte (~2,000,000,000 kilobyte) hard disk for $80, which works out to $.00000004 dollars per kilobyte.

A Star Raiders cartridge sold for $32, which is equivalent to $79.46 in 2011 dollars.

A pair of joysticks (I assume official Atari brand) went for $15, which is equivalent to $37.25 today.

[ From Omega Sales Co., Inc. Invoice, July 1981 ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the most memorable computer or video game item your parents have ever purchased for you?

I don’t think I’ve ever played Tetrisphere. I’m sure I’ll try it some day. But the game itself is almost beside the point here. Egad on the broken teeth, man. That is my worst nightmare.

Nintendo crafted this ad to be perfectly in line with the prevailing advertising style of the mid-late 1990s. Look back at a game magazine from that time and you’ll see that almost every ad shows someone getting hurt, dismembered, or flagellated in some manner. And if not that, then they were too busy distributing boogers / urine / feces / something gross all over the place to feel left out. The edgy advertising trend started when Sega began purposely assaulting Nintendo’s kiddie image in the early 1990s. And it spread. By 1996, even Mario games were advertised this way. Did you Play it Loud?

I covered this phenomenon to some extent back in my Game Ads A-Go-Go column on GameSetWatch in 2006 (especially “Proof that Video Game Companies Want You to Die“). The 90s were a time of growing pains — a sort of “teenage years” for the medium — when the game industry, gamers, press, and lawmakers alike embarked on an entirely new cultural exploration of mature themes in video games. I’m sure I could write a whole article on the subject, so I’ll stop now and let you count your teeth.

[ From GamePro, May 1997, p.171 ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your all-time favorite version of Tetris?

Thirty years ago this month, Nintendo released Donkey Kong in the arcade. The title introduced Mario to the world and turned Nintendo of America’s fortunes around.

Since the Mario character first debuted in Donkey Kong, we could just as well be celebrating Mario’s 30th birthday. I’m sure someone will figure that out and write about it soon (if they haven’t already). But folks celebrate Mario endlessly, regardless of anniversary or season, so I think it’s time to focus on his simian rival and the game they first starred in together.

That’s why I put together Donkey Kong Oddities, which celebrates the game in that very Benj way — by finding weird and interesting tidbits of Donkey Kong-related ephemera and compiling them in a graphically-rich slideshow. I hope you enjoy it.